Ubud Writers and Readers Festival #1

Sophie Cunningham October 13

It’s a tough job representing Meanjin at so many writers festivals, but someone’s got to do it. So here is my intrepid report from the wilds of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Due to the demands of actual, you know, work, this adventure might be described over several blog posts. (As it has been also, by Crikey blogger, Bob Gosford)

I arrived on the afternoon of Tuesday October 5, and checked into my hotel. Soon there would be 120 writers converging on this relatively small –and extremely beautiful – Balinese town. There were several other festival guests staying at the same hotel as me, and these were the writers I got to have the most conversations with, as we were ferried into town and out in the evening together. Two of these were the extremely impressive husband-wife team of Mark Jensen and Pauline Nguyen, who, along with Pauline’s brother Luke, run Red Lantern restaurant in Sydney. Pauline was on several panels about food, and she and Mark ran workshops and threw a literary lunch. Sian Prior was also staying there – she was representing Meanjin – which she did by sitting on three panels and running one workshop.

An old friend of mine, Caroline Baum, was there to do several gigs, including interviewing Booker prize winner Ann Enright, and Tash Aw the impressive author of Map of the Invisible World, was also spotted by the infinity pool.

The very friendly Ezra Bix, a Victorian Slam Poet, did more than sit by the pool – he was doing 50 laps a day. Marie Munkara was a guest (we’d share a reading later in the week), as was the extraordinarily elegant Anna Moi was also staying at Alila. (Below is footage of one of her events from the festival).

That first evening we were taken to the Four Seasons for a cocktail party. As we walked down the ramp towards a pool full of water lilies that appeared to float over a ravine I started to wonder if we were all, in fact, extras on a James Bond set. The first two people I saw were Shane Maloney and Frank Moorhouse, sipping on their blue cocktails. I asked Frank if he’d really once said that Meanjin was ‘aboriginal for rejected by The New Yorker’. He said he – or one of the characters from The Americans, Baby, had said that.

As for Shane, in our conversation we acknowledged the obvious. ‘We’re not in Brunswick anymore.’

The best thing about this festival was the conversations people had – and my first was with Radio National’s Tony MacGregor, who has done a lot of work on the history of music in Bali – apparently recordings made of traditional music back in the 1920s is now used to teach younger generations how to play trad music. That is, it helps compensate of the loss of oral learning and breakdown in traditional culture. I met Edgar Keret, whose appearance at the festival had been complicated by the fact that Indonesia does not have formal diplomatic ties with Israel.

I also talked at length to Tony Maniaty, who, like me, is working on a novel set in World War I – the result was a real history nerd conversation. At about eight we were taken to another hotel for a more formal meal and entertainment that included poetry readings, including quite a rude poem by Emilie Zoe Baker, called ‘Wet’, in homage to the humidity – that also appeared to have references to vaginas. But perhaps I was mistaken. Then, slightly more alarmingly, a classical singer sung a song from Cats.

On the Wednesday evening, the festival officially opened. The opening was held at the Royal Palace, and while heavy on the speeches, had some fabulous dancing, (see Bob’s blog, linked to above) and the very moving announcement that Sitor Situmorang had won a lifetime achievement award. Sitor was an 1945-generation writer who was once jailed for eight years without trial for his essay, ‘Revolutionary Literature’ – and he was to be interviewed the next day by Tony MacGregor – it that interview turns up as a podcast, I’ll link to it.

The next morning, Sian headed off to run a three-hour workshop on the art of reviewing, and I went to a session given by Anne-Ruth Wertheim, on the characteristics of racism. Born of Dutch parents, in Jakarta, Anne-Ruth was held in a camp during WW2. After a while in one camp, the fact her father was Jewish meant the family was put into a Jewish camp where the conditions were even worse. She talked at length about the stratification of Indonesian society at that time, and the fact that being Dutch was perceived as being so preferable that families with mixed heritage identified as Dutch even though it meant being put in a camp. That is, it was considered to be better to be in a camp and called Dutch, than living, freely, as an Indonesian. Those that made that particular decision inevitably lived to regret it. Anne-Ruth had developed a theory of two types of racism, one which was ‘colonial’ that is that the view that colonisers had that the people they rule were lazy and child-like, the second being competitive. That is, the perception that some groups were greedy etc. Anti-semitism falls into this camp. It was a strange session – moving in some ways, and obsessive in its detail about categories – but I found that in itself interesting. If your entire life has been defined by relatively arbitrary categories, you would grow to live by them. One of the things I liked about the festival was that people who did not write in English were a part of if – so, even though I could not buy Anne-Ruth’s books, I could hear her story and ideas.

After that I was on a session myself, on Digital Futures, with the Indonesian writers Dewi Lestari and Yudhi Heriwibowo. Dewi is a singer as well as a writer, so she talked about publishing CDs with her stories, self publishing and writing for mobile phones. She also talked about the time pressures involved in effective social media (you’ll find her on twitter). Yudhi, who spoke in Indonesian using a translator, talked about his reservations about digital media – he felt that the ease of pirating in the digital world was particularly problematic in a country such as Indonesia where there is so little copyright protection. I found this latter point particularly interesting. Unfortunately Yudhi is only published in Indonesian, so I can’t read his work.

Stay tuned for further adventures of …

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